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Homecoming is the poet's every theme, declares Heidegger, thus the need to "put our boys back together again" voiced at the end of MASH. War is over and uneasy domesticity begins, three servicemen find out. The infantry sergeant (Fredric March) feels like a stranger in his own living-room, presents his son with a samurai sword and is promptly asked about Hiroshima, grimly accepts the promotion at the bank. "Last year it was kill japs, this year it's make money." The Air Force captain (Dana Andrews) returns to a drugstore dead end, plus a wife (Virginia Mayo) who prefers the decorated uniform to the traumatized man. The seaman (Harold Russell) is a former jock with blasted-off mitts, family and fiancée (Cathy O'Donnell) kill him with kindness. "You gotta hand it to the Navy. They sure trained that kid how to use those hooks." "They couldn't train him to put his arms around his girl, to stroke her hair..." William Wyler's achievement is a paradoxical one, a virtuosic neutrality for the emotions of veterans and their relations, a bitter streak coursing through the paean to reaffirmed Americana. "Am I really home?" The department store is an alarming panorama of hanging price signs, the tavern is a cavernous sanctuary where multiple planes of activity join via Gregg Toland's deep-focus lenses. The sergeant must unlearn the humanity he saw on the battlefield to enter big business, he surrenders sardonically while his wife (Myrna Loy) marks the banquet tablecloth with a fork to keep track of his martinis. A walk across the cemetery of mangled military metal, a mental state reflected in the opaque glass of a bombardier cockpit. "Reviving old memories, huh?" "Or maybe getting some of them out of my system." The captain's walk from foreground to the sweetheart (Teresa Wright) in the background at the wedding completes the image of balance, the jagged updates come from Ashby (Coming Home) and Cimino (The Deer Hunter). With Hoagy Carmichael, Gladys George, Ray Collins, Roman Bohnen, Minna Gombell, Walter Baldwin, Dorothy Adams, and Steve Cochran. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |